How to explain DLC to your Coworkers

It’s a complicated, always-online world we live in and even young’ens today don’t always understand how it all works. In explaining why renting Fable 2 and buying the Knothole Island DLC was a silly idea to a coworker I came up with this little gem of an analogy:

Renting a game and buying content is like renting a car and buying a stereo for it. It’s only useful when you’ve got that car.

It’s not the perfect example, I realize. You can stick moststereos in any car but you can also get Achievements from DLC that don’t go away when you return the rental. Until the concept of downloadable content is a little more ubiquitous, that’s the best I can do.

I have two coworkers who really just got into gaming within the past year. I’ve had to explain a lot of things, luckily that wasn’t one of them.

As stupid as it would seem to pay for DLC on a rental… there is *some* value to that. Maybe you’re a person who desperately wants to play a certain game, plus that game’s DLC, but you don’t want to actually pay full price and don’t care that the game will be gone soon. Money spent on that DLC is money that’s gone forever, but so is the cash you put on the game just to rent it in the first place. So, it’s like throwing money away either way. If you’re content to spend money for a temporary game, what’s a few bucks more to expand it?

That’s the argument I can see someone using who wants to justify it. To myself, it seems absurd. Especially since most worthwhile content nowadays is in the $10-$20 range, more than what it would cost to rent a game by itself.